Allbirds, Inc. Announces Expansion into AI Compute Infrastructure
ir.allbirds.comme: i would like to buy some sneakers
allbirds: ok
me: i'd also like to buy compute capacity to run AI inference on the cheap lol do u know where i can find a good one
allbirds: ur not gonna believe this
On top of this whole thing just being ridiculous, $50mm is also just not a very impressive amount of money to build out an AI data center.
The $50M is for keeping the company alive long enough for the c suite to finish tearing the copper out of the walls
If you can somehow get your hands on a dozen NVL72 racks and duct tape them together in such a way to rent them out as a service, you can make your money back in less than 2 years at current demand pricing. $50M is more than enough to get this going.
I'm not sure how many companies would trust a failed shoe company to be responsible for their compute.
I'd sign up if the price is right. Workloads can easily be moved if something goes down.
Expect grift in the grift economu.
Ridiculous? Tandy (leather originally) became a large computer company for a while. So who's to say really.
This is absolutely doomed but how funny would it be if 50 years from now people share trivia like "Hey did you know that Allbirds started as a shoe company?" the way people talk about Nintendo starting as a playing card company
That makes me wonder, are there any major examples of this kind of abrupt pivot actually succeeding?
Nintendo was a much more gradual product shift that makes sense in retrospect: playing cards -> tabletop games and toys -> video games.
Or another gradual example was Tandy Corporation, which went from making leather crafts -> general crafting/DIY to electronics crafting -> Radio Shack and Tandy computers. That one's funny because the original leather business was spun out and still exists.
But abruptly going from shoes to AI datacenters, or iced tea to blockchain, etc I really wonder if there's any non-scam precedent of that abrupt shift actually working for a major known brand?
The one that springs to mind is Tiny Speck launching an MMORPG, failing, and then polishing up the in-game chat tool and releasing it as Slack.
Oh, there was a certain pair of Ohio bike shop owners who pivoted to powered flight some time back.
Shopify is a pivot from selling snowboards online in Canada
Yeah these are definitely some good examples of startups doing major abrupt pivots after a few years. But I was hoping to figure out if there were any successful examples of established, well-known brands doing it. (For comparison to the original topic, Allbirds was founded 11 years ago and is post-IPO.)
All Stewart tries to do is make game companies, and all Stewart actually ends up doing is starting big non-game-related tech companies.
Nokia was a pulp mill, a rubber boot manufacturer, and a tire maker. But it's also old enough (1865!) to have changed with industrialization itself.
Yeah, doesn't this reek of the Dotcom era where non-digital companies would just slap (.com) at the end of their name for the stock boost?
Samsung started as a trading company for dried fish, noodles and groceries. Now it does many things as a conglomerate but it’s mostly known as an electronics company.
Toyota started as a company to produce looms. It’s now mostly known as an automotive company.
Nintendo moving from playing cards (although they still make them) to computer gaming makes much more sense to me than this.
Nokia?
Long Island Iced Tea Corp did this back in 2017 when they rebranded to "Long Blockchain Corp".
Allbirds should've rebranded itself as AIbirds.
Looks like someone beat them to the joke, parody website at:
>Sneakernet is coming back.The cloud is expensive. The network is slow. Your feet are already trained. Why pay millions for GPUs when you can just walk the data to the next room? AIIbirds: making physical movement cool again
... and that was also a year before the crypto winter in 2018 :)
I personally welcome the new GPUs that smell like wet dog and look like a old subway sandwiched left in the rain.
Thank you. Your comment made me laugh so hard.
I had some of those wool runners for a while and had a mid-twenties lady in the train sitting right next to me one rainy autumn day, and she looked at me until we had eye contact and said, "Sir, don’t take this personally, but your shoes smell like wet dog, it’s awful.” She was right. I bought her coffee on the way out to apologize. Last time I bought Allbirds.
I once worked in an office that told everyone they had to stop wearing them. They are hideous and smell terrible at an impressive range.
Are we in a bubble yet? The sneakers are doing AI now.
"Even if you escape the house the AI is in the sneakers!"
It's not an expansion. The first line says they sold the shoe business which will continue under someone else. The company is changing names and its line of business.
That doesn't cause it to make any more sense. The leadership tab still shows the CEO is the same guy from the past 5 years, previously the President of Mountain Hardware and before that a VP at North Face, with a degree in Forestry Science.
What on earth qualifies this guy or this company to build out GPU as a service infrastructure?
The CTO is at least, as should be expected of any CTO, an actual engineer with a technical background, but he's been working in engineering leadership for Allbirds for the past 9 years, and as far as I'm aware, at no point in that duration did they own or operate data centers.
Skills can't seriously be that fungible that a complete lack of any domain-relevant experience means nothing. I have no idea how reputable "Chardan" is as an investment bank, but how on earth did they sell this to investors and who did they sell to? What on earth is a "convertible financing facility?" If I web search that, every result is a press release about Allbirds. Did this bank invent some new form of finance that only Allbirds has ever used?
You’re assuming this is a good faith effort to rebuild the company.
I have no proof of this, but if I were a gambling man, I’d bet this is a pump and dump opportunity for insiders who are stuck with large volumes of stock that has bottomed to almost nothing since the IPO.
FYI "convertible" instruments aren't new, I suspect its just unusual phrasing that's tripping up your search. "Convertible bonds" or "convertible securities" are more common terms IME. Either way it's typically a bond/security that can be held _or_ converted at a preset strike price. Eg a convertible bond has a slightly discounted coupon (interest) for the holder. The bond can be converted to a fixed number of shares (equity), effectively at at a pre defined price/share. If the per-share price appreciates the bond holder can convert at capture the vallue above their strike price. If the associated equity falls (or doesnt appreciate) the bond holder 1) holds to maturity 2) is senior to equity holders for recovery.
In short, the allbirds financiers are taking a slightly reduced interest payment in exchange for the option to capture stock price appreciation if the gamble finds a greater fool.
Allbirds ran on Shopify... was the CTO a shoe engineer?
This reminds me of when a coworker left to go help develop Technicolor's (yes, that Technicolor) new social media platform.
> This reminds me of when a coworker left to go help develop Technicolor's (yes, that Technicolor) new social media platform.
Random semi-related memory unlocked:
I briefly worked at Technicolor along with most of the people who were at Chumby Industries when it imploded.
As part of the wind-down of Chumby a deal was struck for Technicolor to take on most of the employees to help build MediaNavi, a Netflix-competitor streaming service. We Chumby hires were mostly focused on working on client-side technology to build the streaming service into early "Smart TVs".
It was a complete disaster and I only lasted there about 3 months. Almost everyone I know that made the transition had left within 6-8 months.
I'm pretty sure this is a few years before Technicolor tried the social media thing.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/20/2963003/chumby-broken-up-...
I hope their foray into compute works out better than their shoemaking. Bought a pair, didn't even last a season before starting to fall apart (which would still be very on brand for the general AI sector).
The shoe company? Edit: The shoe company.
I basically clicked in to this post because I thought it was funny that an AI company had the same name as a shoe company.
But, no, it’s actually the same company.
And a failed shoe company at that… I beleive they sold out for around $40M, which isn’t zero, but a lot less than the rounds of funding they raised.
shoe shine boy is trying to sell me compute
I'm also surprised how few people know about Tulip Mania[0]. Funny thing about bubbles is that mostly everyone seems to know its a bubble, but they think they will have a seat when the music stops.
It’s not an expansion, they are selling the shoe assets. It’s basically just starting a new business and redeploying capital (if there is any). It’s just a really odd way to announce and undertake it.
Each step powers one Claude conversation
Are we in a bubble yet? Still no? Ok...
If my math is right they can acquire about 1800 (lowish end) enterprise AI-capable GPUs for $50M so exactly what are they going to do with that? Seems pretty small.
LOL.
This reminds me of when the Long Island Iced Tea company renamed themselves to the Long Blockchain Corp in 2017 when crypto was soaring and their stock immediately took off.
Four years later the SEC charged three people (including the company's majority shareholder) with insider trading.
Most folks on the NotTheOnion subreddit (where you post actual news headlines that you'd assume would be from The Onion) say this is their recent favorite
This makes my start-up's pivots look a lot smaller
Their shoes are great for pivoting!
I knew something was up when every morning I'd find my Allbirds mysteriously on top of my keyboard. And coincidentally, someone has been using all of my Claude tokens every night...
But my jogging has been great recently! I've been posting PBs on Strava, though I don't remember creating a Strava account any time... hmmm...
What a time to be alive.
I have a pair of Allbirds, they're pretty comfy. I like them.
What, ah, do they have to do with AI?
I like them too. Still have a pair from around 2019 (around the time I started working remote).
They were absolute trash for daily, lasted me only few months and stank like hell.
It might be time for Long Island Ice Tea Corp. to transition from blockchain to AI.
Stock’s up 600% on the ‘news’
This just in: suzzer99 is pivoting to AI. Get in early.
They were basically bankrupt 2 weeks ago and sold for $39M. The stock pop shows me that we're in a bubble of irrational exuberance. And what are they going to to with 50M? Buy a few racks of servers?
This a last ditch effort to pop the stock a little so investors can get out?
Seemed to work
Seems weird the new name is singular ("Newbird AI") when the old name is plural. Wonder how they chose that. I can't imagine "Newbirds AI" was taken!
I hope this doesn't mess up their shoes. I am allergic to the plastic/leather in most shoes and allbirds is one of the few brands that typically is ok.
They sold the shoe business for a new company to mess up
i do not know why this is surprising to literally anyone. did we think the D2C shoes made of felt were still a smashing business success/going concern? or have we not fully memorized the narratives that procure funding for struggling companies in this climate?
So is it going to be cool again to wear Allbirds, in an ironic way? Or do I need to burn mine?
Wait, weren't they making sneakers? I'm pretty much sure I have a pair
Related:
Allbirds announces pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes 175%
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai...
Didnt they learn their lessons from oracle?
If their slogan isn't "The Sole of a New Machine", I'll be disappointed.
The tech bro shoe really living up to it's name
Literally had to check the date with this one.
What?!
Same. thought this was an april fools joke.
”AI” is the new “.com”
SMH
This is the height of ridiculousness.
I guess if there are "second chances" in American capitalism (and 3rd, 4th, 5th,...) then literally any pivot makes sense ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess then nobody should complain that everybody and their grandmas pivot to doing vibe coding, either. And if they produce AI slop, so be it...
As others have noted, this is like the crypto pivot that many companies did a few years ago
This is good news for AI. These kind of pivots just show what a revolutionary and world-changing technology this is.
Invest now! This is the lowest AI stocks will ever be.
Even if they only have a 1 in a trillion chance of getting to AGI/Superintelligence first, the expected value of that (the total value of all goods an services on earth for the next 10,000 years / one trillion) is massive! They are clearly undervalued.
Sounds like pets.com in 1999
> Sounds like pets.com in 1999
But that was a bubble, but AI is not a bubble! It is a revolution in the way we work! That's why your leaders have made AI-embracement metrics a critical part of your performance evaluation.
Do you recall the iced tea company rebranding to a blockchain play a few years ago?
Smells the same to me.
No. This is the Jump the Shark moment for AI. Allbirds cannot compete with big AI players for GPUs As a Service.... This is nonsense. This company will go to Zero.
bad news for big shoe